On 7/22/13 2:53 AM, Peter Krautzberger wrote:
2) TeX/LaTeX compatibility might be lost.
"Native" content (e.g. <maction> or even subexpression links) has no
counterpart in TeX. Conservative extensions of TeX can easily enable this
kind of content but backward compatibility will be lost.
If this means MathML as the canonical format, i.e. people write MathML
into articles directly, rather than it just being an output/rendering
format, that gives me moderate worry:
1. From the perspective of being able to repurpose Wikipedia articles
outside of a web context, TeX-format equations are nice for articles in
the math/science sphere, since TeX-based publishing workflows are common
in math/science, and equations are particularly tedious and error-prone
to convert by hand, if that would end up necessary. Admittedly, in some
workflows there's no real difference: you can import both MathML and TeX
equations into MS Word with appropriate plugins (I haven't looked into
whether the two import paths differ on compatibility). Perhaps as
HTML-based print workflows improve this will drop off as an issue, but
right now only a smallish proportion of people are using workflows based
on something like PrinceXML, and the free-software alternatives to
PrinceXML are further behind.
2. From a wikitext-readability perspective, TeX-format equations are the
de-facto standard way of ASCII-fying equations, e.g. in plaintext
emails, while MathML isn't written in a syntax any humans normally
write. So using TeX as our underlying representation makes equations
possible to edit in text form, at least for people who already
professionally work in areas where that's common, while MathML equations
virtually require a visual editor (unless the idea is to use something
like ASCIIMathML?).
-Mark